CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/3/2013

Richard Kern: Contact High

In the introduction to his new monograph, Contact High, photographer Richard Kern writes, "When I was sixteen or seventeen (around 1970), I spent a lot of time with my friends smoking pot, listening to music, running around in the woods, and sometimes swimming naked. Back then, when I was around a naked girl, weed was either about to be smoked or had been smoked. In 1999, I met a model in LA who reminded me of the girls I used to smoke with back in North Carolina. I went down to Charleston, South Carolina to shoot her at her house and in the swamps around there. Her ambition at 18 years old was to open a head shop. She had a small grow-light farm in her bedroom. In the photos in this book, I was looking for that moment of youthful optimistic inebriation after which anything is possible." Featured image is "London" (2012). A related exhibition is on view at Feature gallery in New York from September 4 – October 12.